These are the noble lines of a noble poet, written in the sternest days of the great Civil War, when the writer, Lowell, was one among the millions of men who mourned the death in battle of kinsfolk dear to him. No man ever lived who hated an unjust war more than Lowell or who loved with more passionate fervor the peace of righteousness. Yet, like the other great poets of his day and country, like Holmes, who sent his own son to the war, like gentle Longfellow and the Quaker Whittier, he abhorred unrighteousness and ignoble peace more than war. These men had lofty souls. They possessed the fighting edge, without which no man is really great; for in the really great man there must be both the heart of gold and the temper of steel.

In 1864 there were in the North some hundreds of thousands of men who praised peace as the supreme end, as a good more important than all other goods, and who denounced war as the worst of all evils. These men one and all assailed and denounced Abraham Lincoln, and all voted against him for President. Moreover, at that time there were many individuals in England and France who said it was the duty of those two nations to mediate between the North and the South, so as to stop the terrible loss of life and destruction of property which attended our Civil War; and they asserted that any Americans who in such event refused to accept their mediation and to stop the war would thereby show themselves the enemies of peace. Nevertheless, Abraham Lincoln and the men back of him by their attitude prevented all such effort at mediation, declaring that they would regard it as an unfriendly act to the United States. Looking back from a distance of fifty years, we can now see clearly that Abraham Lincoln and his supporters were right. Such mediation would have been a hostile act, not only to the United States but to humanity. The men who clamored for unrighteous peace fifty years ago this fall were the enemies of mankind.

These facts should be pondered by the well-meaning men who always clamor for peace without regard to whether peace brings justice or injustice. Very many of the men and women who are at times misled into demanding peace, as if it were itself an end instead of being a means of righteousness, are men of good intelligence and sound heart who only need seriously to consider the facts, and who can then be trusted to think aright and act aright. There is, however, an element of a certain numerical importance among our people, including the members of the ultrapacificist group, who by their teachings do some real, although limited, mischief. They are a feeble folk, these ultrapacificists, morally and physically; but in a country where voice and vote are alike free, they may, if their teachings are not disregarded, create a condition of things where the crop they have sowed in folly and weakness will be reaped with blood and bitter tears by the brave men and high-hearted women of the nation.

The folly preached by some of these individuals is somewhat startling, and if it were translated from words into deeds it would constitute a crime against the nation. One professed teacher of morality made the plea in so many words that we ought to follow the example of China and deprive ourselves of all power to repel foreign attack. Surely this writer must have possessed the exceedingly small amount of information necessary in order to know that nearly half of China was under foreign dominion and that while he was writing the Germans and Japanese were battling on Chinese territory and domineering as conquerors over the Chinese in that territory. Think of the abject soul of a man capable of holding up to the admiration of free-born American citizens such a condition of serfage under alien rule!

Nor is the folly confined only to the male sex. A number of women teachers in Chicago are credited with having proposed, in view of the war, hereafter to prohibit in the teaching of history any reference to war and battles. Intellectually, of course, such persons show themselves unfit to be retained as teachers a single day, and indeed unfit to be pupils in any school more advanced than a kindergarten. But it is not their intellectual, it is also their moral shortcomings which are striking. The suppression of the truth is, of course, as grave an offense against morals as is the suggestion of the false or even the lie direct; and these teachers actually propose to teach untruths to their pupils. True teachers of history must tell the facts of history; and if they do not tell the facts both about the wars that were righteous and the wars that were unrighteous, and about the causes that led to these wars and to success or defeat in them, they show themselves morally unfit to train the minds of boys and girls. If in addition to telling the facts they draw the lessons that should be drawn from the facts, they will give their pupils a horror of all wars that are entered into wantonly or with levity or in a spirit of mere brutal aggression or save under dire necessity. But they will also teach that among the noblest deeds of mankind are those that have been done in great wars for liberty, in wars of self-defense, in wars for the relief of oppressed peoples, in wars for putting an end to wrong-doing in the dark places of the globe.

Any teachers, in school or college, who occupied the position that these foolish, foolish teachers have sought to take, would be forever estopped from so much as mentioning Washington and Lincoln; because their lives are forever associated with great wars for righteousness. These teachers would be forever estopped from so much as mentioning the shining names of Marathon and Salamis. They would seek to blind their pupils’ eyes to the glory held in the deeds and deaths of Joan of Arc, of Andreas Hofer, of Alfred the Great, of Arnold von Winkelried, of Kosciusko and RÁkÓczy. They would be obliged to warn their pupils against ever reading Schiller’s “William Tell” or the poetry of Koerner. Such men are deaf to the lament running:

To them Holmes’s ballad of Bunker Hill and Whittier’s “Laus Deo,” MacMaster’s “Ode to the Old Continentals” and O’Hara’s “Bivouac of the Dead” are meaningless. Their cold and timid hearts are not stirred by the surge of the tremendous “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” On them lessons of careers like those of Timoleon and John Hampden are lost; in their eyes the lofty self-abnegation of Robert Lee and Stonewall Jackson was folly; their dull senses do not thrill to the deathless deaths of the men who died at ThermopylÆ and at the Alamo—the fight of those grim Texans of which it was truthfully said that ThermopylÆ had its messengers of death but the Alamo had none.

It has actually been proposed by some of these shivering apostles of the gospel of national abjectness that, in view of the destruction that has fallen on certain peaceful powers of Europe, we should abandon all efforts at self-defense, should stop building battle-ships, and cease to take any measures to defend ourselves if attacked. It is difficult seriously to consider such a proposition. It is precisely and exactly as if the inhabitants of a village in whose neighborhood highway robberies had occurred should propose to meet the crisis by depriving the local policeman of his revolver and club.

There are, however, many high-minded people who do not agree with these extremists, but who nevertheless need to be enlightened as to the actual facts. These good people, who are busy people and not able to devote much time to thoughts about international affairs, are often confused by men whose business it is to know better. For example, a few weeks ago these good people were stirred to a moment’s belief that something had been accomplished by the enactment at Washington of a score or two of all-inclusive arbitration treaties; being not unnaturally misled by the fact that those responsible for the passage of the treaties indulged in some not wholly harmless bleating as to the good effects they would produce. As a matter of fact, they probably will not produce the smallest effect of any kind or sort. Yet it is possible they may have a mischievous effect, inasmuch as under certain circumstances to fulfil them would cause frightful disaster to the United States, while to break them, even although under compulsion and because it was absolutely necessary, would be fruitful of keen humiliation to every right-thinking man who is jealous of our international good name.

If for example, whatever the outcome of the present war, a great triumphant military despotism declared that it would not recognize the Monroe Doctrine or seized Magdalena Bay, or one of the Dutch West Indies, or the Island of St. Thomas, and fortified it; or if—as would be quite possible—it announced that we had no right to fortify the Isthmus of Panama, and itself landed on adjacent territory to erect similar fortifications; then, under these absurd treaties, we would be obliged, if we happened to have made one of them with one of the countries involved, to go into an interminable discussion of the subject before a joint commission, while the hostile nation proceeded to make its position impregnable. It seems incredible that the United States government could have made such treaties; but it has just done so, with the warm approval of the professional pacificists.

These treaties were entered into when the administration had before its eyes at that very moment the examples of Belgium and Luxembourg, which showed beyond possibility of doubt, especially when taken in connection with other similar incidents that have occurred during the last couple of decades, that there are various great military empires in the Old World who will pay not one moment’s heed to the most solemn and binding treaty, if it is to their interest to break it. If any one of these empires, as the result of the present contest, obtains something approaching to a position of complete predominance in the Old World, it is absolutely certain that it would pay no heed whatever to these treaties, if it desired to better its position in the New World by taking possession of the Dutch or Danish West Indies or of the territory of some weak American state on the mainland of the continent. In such event we would be obliged either instantly ourselves to repudiate the scandalous treaties by which the government at Washington has just sought to tie our hands—and thereby expose ourselves in our turn to the charge of bad faith—or else we should have to abdicate our position as a great power and submit to abject humiliation.

Since these articles of mine were written and published, I am glad to see that James Bryce, a lifelong advocate of peace and the stanchest possible friend of the United States, has taken precisely the position herein taken. He dwells, as I have dwelt, upon the absolute need of protecting small states that behave themselves from absorption in great military empires. He insists, as I have insisted, upon the need of the reduction of armaments, the quenching of the baleful spirit of militarism, and the admission of the peoples everywhere to a fuller share in the control of foreign policy—all to be accomplished by some kind of international league of peace. He adds, however, as the culminating and most important portion of his article:

“But no scheme for preventing future wars will have any chance of success unless it rests upon the assurance that the states which enter it will loyally and steadfastly abide by it and that each and all of them will join in coercing by their overwhelming united strength any state which may disregard the obligations it has undertaken.”

This is almost exactly what I have said. Indeed, it is almost word for word what I have said—an agreement which is all the more striking because when he wrote it Lord Bryce could not have known what I had written. We must insist on righteousness first and foremost. We must strive for peace always; but we must never hesitate to put righteousness above peace. In order to do this, we must put force back of righteousness, for, as the world now is, national righteousness without force back of it speedily becomes a matter of derision. To the doctrine that might makes right, it is utterly useless to oppose the doctrine of right unbacked by might.

It is not even true that what the pacificists desire is right. The leaders of the pacificists of this country who for five months now have been crying, “Peace, peace,” have been too timid even to say that they want the peace to be a righteous one. We needlessly dignify such outcries when we speak of them as well-meaning. The weaklings who raise their shrill piping for a peace that shall consecrate successful wrong occupy a position quite as immoral as and infinitely more contemptible than the position of the wrong-doers themselves. The ruthless strength of the great absolutist leaders—Elizabeth of England, Catherine of Russia, Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck—is certainly infinitely better for their own nations and is probably better for mankind at large than the loquacious impotence, ultimately trouble-breeding, which has recently marked our own international policy. A policy of blood and iron is sometimes very wicked; but it rarely does as much harm, and never excites as much derision, as a policy of milk and water—and it comes dangerously near flattery to call the foreign policy of the United States under President Wilson and Mr. Bryan merely one of milk and water. Strength at least commands respect; whereas the prattling feebleness that dares not rebuke any concrete wrong, and whose proposals for right are marked by sheer fatuity, is fit only to excite weeping among angels and among men the bitter laughter of scorn.

At this moment any peace which leaves unredressed the wrongs of Belgium, and which does not effectively guarantee Belgium and all other small nations that behave themselves, against the repetition of such wrongs would be a well-nigh unmixed evil. As far as we personally are concerned, such a peace would inevitably mean that we should at once and in haste have to begin to arm ourselves or be exposed in our turn to the most frightful risk of disaster. Let our people take thought for the future. What Germany did to Belgium because her need was great and because she possessed the ruthless force with which to meet her need she would, of course, do to us if her need demanded it; and in such event what her representatives now say as to her intentions toward America would trouble her as little as her signature to the neutrality treaties troubled her when she subjugated Belgium. Nor does she stand alone in her views of international morality. More than one of the great powers engaged in this war has shown by her conduct in the past that if it profited her she would without the smallest scruple treat any land in the two Americas as Belgium has been treated. What has recently happened in the Old World should be pondered deeply by the nations of the New World; by Chile, Argentina, and Brazil no less than by the United States. The world war has proved beyond peradventure that the principle underlying the Monroe Doctrine is of vast moment to the welfare of all America, and that neither this nor any other principle can be made effective save as power is put behind it.

Belgium was absolutely innocent of offense. Her cities have been laid waste or held to ransom for gigantic sums of money; her fruitful fields have been trampled into mire; her sons have died on the field of battle; her daughters are broken-hearted fugitives; a million of her people have fled to foreign lands. Entirely disregarding all accusations as to outrages on individuals, it yet remains true that disaster terrible beyond belief has befallen this peaceful nation of six million people who themselves had been guilty of not even the smallest wrong-doing. Louvain and Dinant are smoke-grimed and blood-stained ruins. Brussels has been held to enormous ransom, although it did not even strive to defend itself. Antwerp did strive to defend itself. Because soldiers in the forts attempted to repulse the enemy, hundreds of houses in the undefended city were wrecked with bombs from air-ships, and throngs of peaceful men, women, and children were driven from their homes by the sharp terror of death. Be it remembered always that not one man in Brussels, not one man in Antwerp, had even the smallest responsibility for the disaster inflicted upon them. Innocence has proved not even the smallest safeguard against such woe and suffering as we in this land can at present hardly imagine.

What befell Antwerp and Brussels will surely some day befall New York or San Francisco, and may happen to many an inland city also, if we do not shake off our supine folly, if we trust for safety to peace treaties unbacked by force. At the beginning of last month, by the appointment of the President, peace services were held in the churches of this land. As far as these services consisted of sermons and prayers of good and wise people who wished peace only if it represented righteousness, who did not desire that peace should come unless it came to consecrate justice and not wrong-doing, good and not evil, the movement represented good. In so far, however, as the movement was understood to be one for immediate peace without any regard to righteousness or justice, without any regard for righting the wrongs of those who have been crushed by unmerited disaster, then the movement represented mischief, precisely as fifty years ago, in 1864, in our own country a similar movement for peace, to be obtained by acknowledgment of disunion and by the perpetuation of slavery, would have represented mischief. In the present case, however, the mischief was confined purely to those taking part in the movement in an unworthy spirit; for (like the peace parades and newspaper peace petitions) it was a merely subjective phenomenon; it had not the slightest effect of any kind, sort, or description upon any of the combatants abroad and could not possibly have any effect upon them. It is well for our own sakes that we should pray sincerely and humbly for the peace of righteousness; but we must guard ourselves from any illusion as to the news of our having thus prayed producing the least effect upon those engaged in the war.

There is just one way in which to meet the upholders of the doctrine that might makes right. To do so we must prove that right will make might, by backing right with might.

In his second inaugural address Andrew Jackson laid down the rule by which every national American administration ought to guide itself, saying: “The foreign policy adopted by our government is to do justice to all, and to submit to wrong by none.”

The statement of the dauntless old fighter of New Orleans is as true now as when he wrote it. We must stand absolutely for righteousness. But to do so is utterly without avail unless we possess the strength and the loftiness of spirit which will back righteousness with deeds and not mere words. We must clear the rubbish from off our souls and admit that everything that has been done in passing peace treaties, arbitration treaties, neutrality treaties, Hague treaties, and the like, with no sanction of force behind them, amounts to literally and absolutely zero, to literally and absolutely nothing, in any time of serious crisis. We must recognize that to enter into foolish treaties which cannot be kept is as wicked as to break treaties which can and ought to be kept. We must labor for an international agreement among the great civilized nations which shall put the full force of all of them back of any one of them, and of any well-behaved weak nation, which is wronged by any other power. Until we have completed this purpose, we must keep ourselves ready, high of heart and undaunted of soul, to back our rights with our strength.